Space Engineers is a sandbox game about engineering, construction and maintenance of space works. Players build space ships and space stations of various sizes and utilization (civil and military), pilot ships and perform asteroid mining.

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Early Access Game

Get instant access and start playing; get involved with this game as it develops.

Note: This Early Access game is not complete and may or may not change further. If you are not excited to play this game in its current state, then you
should wait to see if the game progresses further in development. Learn more

What the developers have to say:

“Space Engineers is an Early Access game, which means that it is still under development but already in a very playable state and contains a vast amount of new features that have been added since its first release (e.g. Multiplayer, Survival mode). The game is being improved on a regular basis through updates that add and polish features and content, optimizations and bug fixes.

We invite you to give us your feedback and suggestions to help us create the best game possible.

July 30

Inventory mass has been now enabled. This means that gravity will affect the ships based on their weight. The more items inserted to the cargo container, the heavier the container will be. The character’s weight is also calculated in the overall weight of the ship grid, but only if the character is actually sitting inside the cockpit. Mass is not calculated for stations. Additionally, a flying particle effect is now displayed on the screen, when the character or a ship is moving faster than 10 m/s. Lastly, we have added two new tutorials to demonstrate the essential survival elements of Oxygen and Energy. The oxygen tutorial covers the various oxygen related blocks, oxygen farms, generators, vents, bottles, tanks and ice, including their control panel functions. The tutorial also addresses the concept of creating an airtight room for pressurization. The energy tutorial starts with an explanation of how to recharge your suit energy which is followed by a series of small challenges that explain the behavior of power within Space Engineers and the different ways you can provide it.

July 23

This week we are introducing the first four tutorial scenarios. These scenarios are designed to slowly introduce new players to the basics of the game. The first tutorial is about movement & tools, the second is about building your first ship, the third scenario revolves around ore refining & component assembly and the last one is focused on conveyors, connectors, ejectors and collectors. Although the tutorial scenarios are basically designed for novice players, they are quiet fun to play even for the more experienced ones. Moreover, we have added the option to make voxels indestructible. Lastly, ventilation blocks can now trigger other blocks based on room pressurization; this will make automated air locks easier to build.

Reviews

“Space Engineers makes welding, joining and glazing seem like the best jobs in the world. It looks superb.”
Rock Paper Shotgun

“Buy, unless you are bereft of even the slightest shred of creativity”
PCGamesN

“Space Engineers generates its own unique brand of fun, whether you're more interested in constructing things or blasting them to bits”
IGN

Steam Workshop

Share your creations with the Community (upload and download worlds)

About This Game

Space Engineers is a sandbox game about engineering, construction and maintenance of space works. Players build space ships and space stations of various sizes and utilization (civil and military), pilot ships and perform asteroid mining.

Space Engineers utilizes a realistic volumetric-based physics engine: all objects can be assembled, disassembled, damaged and destroyed. The game comes with two game modes: creative and survival.

Space Engineers is inspired by reality and by how things work. Think about modern-day NASA technology extrapolated 60 years into the future. Space Engineers strives to follow the laws of physics and doesn't use technologies that wouldn't be feasible in the near future.

Space Engineers concentrates on construction aspects, but can be played as a tactical shooter as well. We expect players to avoid engaging in direct man-to-man combat and instead use their creativity and engineering skills to build war machines and fortifications. Space Engineers shouldn’t be about troops; it should be about the machinery you build.

Scenarios - Easy Start 1 – start on an asteroid platform with one large ship and two small ships
- Easy Start 2 – start in a green asteroid station with several large and small ships (this is a large scene!)
- Lone Survivor – start on an abandoned asteroid platform with no ships
- Crashed Red Ship – your mother ship just crashed...
- Two Platforms – competitive two-team multi-player world
- Asteroids – start in a rescue ship with very limited resources
- Empty World – no asteroids, no ships; suitable for creative mode

Dedicated servers - allow players to connect to a third party host, rather than using a player-host, in a peer-to-peer set-up. The result is a faster connection and a more fluent multiplayer performance with less lag

Ships (small and large ships – build them, pilot them and crush them

Space stations

First-person & Third-person

Super-large worlds – the size of the world to 1,000,000,000 km in diameter (almost infinite)

Procedural asteroids - adds an infinite number of asteroids to the game world

Exploration - adds an infinite number of ships and stations to the game world; discover, explore, acquire and conquer!

Drilling / harvesting

Manual building in survival mode – use welder to assemble blocks from components; use grinder to disassemble and reuse components

Scenario editor - players can create missions and game modes which can be played by other players. Capture the flag, deathmatch, racing or campaign driven missions - all can be done by using the scenario editor, with your own rules and designs

Custom colors for blocks – Customize your creations by using any color you like

Cargo ships - auto-piloted vessels (miners, freighters and military) that carry ore, ingots, constructions components and other materials from sector to sector. They can be looted but beware, they often contain booby traps!

Conveyor, Collector, Connector (IMPORTANT: this is a first work-in-progress version and a realistic version will be added later) - Conveyors move items from inventory to inventory. Collectors can collect small objects (ore, ingots, components, tools) into inventory. Connectors can throw items from inventory to space (in future update could be used to connect two ships/stations and transfer items)

Artificial mass – can be used to add gravity-affected mass to ships, useful in machine ships or cars

Wheels - use them with rotors and artificial mass to build vehicles

Automated turrets – gatling, missile and interior. Turrets are used mostly as defense mechanism rather than shooting other players. They aim on decoys (automatically by default), meteorites, missiles or all moving objects (eg. small/large ships) - targeting can be changed in the control panel

Large weapons - missile launcher (for large ships)

Large and small ship grinder and welder – assemble and disassemble blocks faster and in larger amount

Batteries - enables players to store the energy generated by solar panels or reactors at an efficiency rate of 80%

Pistons - offers the option to build more advanced machinery

Factions - create and join factions, determine ownership of blocks and manage the relations between them (hostile/ally). NOTE: Factions are currently Work-in-Progress. There are still many things to be added (eg. chat and communication) and some bugs/issues are yet to be fixed.

Remote ship control – control ships without being inside the ship’s cockpit (drones)

Modding API - brings a lot of new possibilities to modders and allows them to alter the game by writing C# scripts which have access to in-game objects (WIP - more features will be added in the future)

Blueprints - save your ship or station on a blueprint and paste it into your game

How to Play

Performance Notes

Space Engineers is in development and undergoing frequent optimizations. The performance will get better.

The performance depends on the complexity of your world and the configuration of your computer. Simple worlds run smoothly even on low-end computers, but a more complex world with rich object interactions could overload even high-end computers.

If this game were only creative mode, it would still be one of the greatest games ever made. I used to describe the game as 'Minecraft in Space', but I think that analogy falls very short of the truth. I've seen people build things in this game that just boggle the mind. One person used a simple set of rotors to make a tank tread that was far more amazing than if the programmers had just put a stock tank tread component into the game. Another person used a series of timers to build an autonomous mining drone that could be set loose to gather materials while the player performed other tasks. The key word in the title of this game isn't 'Space', it's 'Engineers'.

- Science Fiction Setting- Realistic Art-Style- you can build spaceships that fly and shoot stuff!- build your own tools (you can build spaceships with mining and/or crafting tools attached to them and use those ships to build even bigger ships or bases)- working in-game programming language (code your own little programs to display container content on a display for example)(I believe it is C+ or something like that)

what I don't like:

- there is not enough to do besides building ships and stuff- the NPC ships just fly a straight line and don't really engage in fights beside shooting their auto-aim turrets- really, there is not much to do besides building and resource gathering

Summary:

I have mixed feelings about this game. The Building part is super fun. The Resource gathering is interesting because you build your own ships for the Job.On the other hand, the lack of content besides building and gathering can make this game pretty boring pretty fast.Interested in building cool spaceships or a moon base? This game might be something for you then.But if you want to use the stuff you have build in cool combat scenarios, you need to join a public server or play with(against) friends.

I woke up on a deserted mining platform and started throwing something vaguely resembling a vehicle together with nothing more than a few power tools and some metal I had for some reason. I got inside and immediately crashed it into a huge ♥♥♥ rock.

"Hey look buddy, I'm an engineer; that means I solve problems. Not problems like 'what is beauty?' Because that would fall within the purview of your conundrums of philosophy. I solve practical problems. Like, how do I get some big, honking piece of metal to transport precious metals across the vaccuum of space? The answer? Use a thruster. And if that dont work; use more thruster. Like this big, heavily armored space cruiser designed by me. Built by me. And you best hope, not pointed at you while traveling at a relative velocity of 104 m/s with the inertial dampners off."

i can say this game is combination of minecraft and x-albion. basically you need to survive to keep your oxygen supply and station/ship powered. and defend from other players if you're on multiplayer server.

on the first day of survival, you need at least to build your own station. to build and complete this station you need mining the asteroid to get resources(iron, gold, platinum, ice, etc). and then manufacture the necesarry part and combine them into various functionable machines(from assembler, refinery, oxygen generator, reactor etc).

the interesting part begin when you join multiplayer server and compete/coop with other player. you can create turrets to defend your station, fighter ships, capital ships, droid, and warhead torpedo to bombard your oppositions.

i can't wait for the dev to implement planet system. this game have potential to make you able to create your own empire.